Fill rate: the KPI that determines how much revenue your agency is missing out on

Fill rate is the KPI that most recruitment agencies don’t track, yet it determines how much revenue they’re missing out on every week. The percentage may sound abstract, but the financial impact certainly isn’t. Find out all about it in this blog.

What does fill rate mean for an employment agency?

The fill rate is the percentage of requested shifts that a temporary employment agency successfully fills. If a client requests twenty shifts and the agency fills sixteen of them, the fill rate is 80 per cent. The four shifts that are not filled represent revenue that goes to a competitor.

For temporary employment agencies in sectors with volatile staff demand (events, catering, retail, logistics), the fill rate is the most direct measure of commercial performance. It is not an HR statistic, but a revenue figure.

Why fill rate is so difficult to track

Most temp employment agencies do not systematically measure their fill rate. Not because it is unimportant, but because the data is scattered across various sources: WhatsApp chats, Excel spreadsheets, emails, and in the mind of the planner who manages the daily chaos.

A request that comes in at 5 pm and remains unanswered until 6.30 pm doesn’t count as a ‘missed shift’ in any sense, but in the meantime the customer has already phoned a competitor. The shift is gone. So is the profit margin.

That’s the problem with fill rate as a metric: the leaks are invisible until you start actively measuring them. And most agencies only do that when it’s already too late.

How do you calculate your fill rate?

The calculation itself is simple:

Fill rate = (filled shifts ÷ requested shifts) × 100

The difficulty lies in the denominator: you also have to count the shifts that you did not cover. And that requires a system that records every request, not just the confirmed placements.

A medium-sized temporary employment agency with fifteen schedulers receives an average of 150 to 200 shift requests per week. Anyone managing this solely via WhatsApp and the telephone has no idea what is slipping through the net.

The hidden cost of a low fill rate

Take a temporary employment agency with twenty planners in the events or catering sector.

On average, each planner handles ten shift requests per week. That amounts to 200 requests per week. With a miss rate of 15 per cent (a conservative estimate for offices still using WhatsApp and Excel), thirty shifts are lost every week.

With an average margin of 90 euros per shift:

• Weekly loss: 30 × €90 = €2,700
• Annual loss: €2,700 × 52 = €140,400

That’s not just a theoretical figure. It’s the turnover you’re losing every week to the firm that does respond quickly enough. And 15 per cent is actually a conservative estimate. Firms without automated coordination see miss rates of 20 to 25 per cent during peak periods.

Why a temporary employment agency is losing shifts

Most missed shifts are not lost because there is no suitable candidate. They are lost because the response time is too slow.

A temporary worker often receives offers from several recruitment agencies at the same time. The first agency to which he or she confirms their availability wins the shift. Speed is not a service factor, but a commercial variable. 

The agencies that consistently achieve higher fill rates are not necessarily those with the largest pool of candidates. They are the agencies that can work through their response process the quickest: receiving an enquiry, contacting candidates, and providing feedback to the client.

With manual coordination via telephone and WhatsApp, that speed depends on a single person: the planner who is available at that moment, who picks up the WhatsApp message and calls back quickly enough. That system is doomed if several requests come in at the same time. And those are precisely the moments when the fill rate matters most.

How to improve your fill rate in practice

There are three factors that can improve or reduce your fill rate.

1. Reaction time

The time between a shift request and confirmation to the client is the most immediate lever for improvement. Agencies that automatically route shift requests to a suitable pool of candidates (without a planner first having to search manually, make calls and provide feedback) reduce that time from hours to minutes.

2. Candidate availability

A high fill rate requires an active, accessible pool of candidates. Candidates who can confirm via an app, rather than having to wait for a phone call, respond more quickly and reliably. The agencies with the highest fill rates are also the ones where candidates enjoy working the most.

3. Visibility of applications

You can only improve your fill rate once you know how many requests are coming in and how many of them are being fulfilled. That requires a single centralised system, rather than one spread across WhatsApp threads and personal calendars.

Payback period: fill rate as a starting point

When a temporary employment agency is considering investing in better planning software, the payback period is the key factor. This calculation starts with the fill rate: missed shifts per week × average margin per shift × 52 = annual loss of turnover. Compare that figure with the cost of the system. For most agencies in the mid-market, the payback period is less than six months.

The debate over ‘is this too expensive?’ takes on a different dimension when you highlight the costs of doing nothing.

Would you like to know how much revenue your firm is missing out on each week? Our consultants will work through the calculation with you in 20 minutes. No obligations.

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Beeple is the workforce orchestration platform for temporary employment agencies in the events, catering, retail and logistics sectors. With over 10 years’ experience in helping agencies fill more shifts more quickly, from small agencies to multinationals such as Manpower Europe and Groupe CRIT.

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